DOCTOR, MOM, CREATOR OF
KIDS 1ST

Dr. Lisa Van Bramer is committed to children's health and safety

By SHARON ALMIRALL
Photography KIT WILLIAMS

Living with devotion to her vocation and love of her family -- and inspired by the mentors in her life -- Dr. Lisa Van Bramer is a role model in the greatest sense of the word.

A research instructor in the Department of Preventive Medicine and Biometrics and clinical instructor in the Division of Emergency Medicine at the University of Colorado at Denver, Dr. Van Bramer, 35, has used her passion and expertise to create a nonprofit organization promoting the health and safety of Colorado children.

Out of her high ideals and unflagging perseverance came Rocky Mountain Research and Prevention Institute (RMRPI), which grew from her belief that an ounce of prevention is the answer to curbing accidents. Her dedicated work has led to a recent appointment as a grant-funded new investigator with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

She says there have been many people in her journey to where she is today who have been valuable in giving her support and encouragement. A key player in the support and encouragement department is her husband, Erik, a national account manager with the Federal Reserve Bank. The two met at Colorado College when she was a freshman and he a junior. “He was wearing a sling, and I asked him if he had broken his collarbone,” she recalls.

Her curiosity about Erik’s medical problem – she was a biology student -- led to their dating and eventually marrying and creating a family. “He knows me so well, he grounds me. He reins me in. He is not overwhelmed by my passion,” she explains.

To explain how she arrived at her dedication to health and safety for children, Dr. Van Bramer tells of an experience during her medical schooling. “I was in my second year of residency at Denver Health and had to resuscitate a 3-year-old whose dad had not restrained her in the car. They had to scrape her off the windshield. The parents were divorced, and the mom came in and asked what could have been done. I restrained myself because of the pain she was going through. But I wanted to tell her if the child had been restrained in the car, it would have made a difference,” Dr. Van Bramer says.

That searing experience left her with an indelible desire to take action to prevent childhood accidents. She developed the idea for RMRPI, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization that serves as a funding resource for health and safety programs. A license plate, Colorado Kids 1st, is an initiative of RMRPI to help Colorado organizations fund their local health and safety projects, beginning in 2007.

A tireless promoter of public health and safety, Dr. Van Bramer had seen a license plate for Kids 1st being sold in Indiana, and that gave her the idea for a Colorado Kids 1st license plate. “I believed we couldn’t create an infrastructure for RMRPI until we had a sustainable funding source. I thought the license plate could be the funding source,” she says.

Getting legislative approval for the license plate would take four legislative sessions, something Dr. Van Bramer had not anticipated, but she refused to give up on the idea. “I didn’t want to get distracted from finding a single funding source, but while waiting for legislative approval, we were approached by a group in Colorado doing free cab rides for people who had been drinking,” she says. The result was she brought a lot of people together for the soberRide™Colorado program, including RTD, police and fire departments and Coors. While she says there isn’t research to prove without a doubt the soberRide program has been effective, it was a fact there were no alcohol-related deaths the first year it was implemented.

Dr. Van Bramer received a $45,000 grant for the National Commission Against Drunk Driving (NCADD) soberRIDE Program from AT&T Wireless and Coors Brewing Company to implement the safe ride program. She also became a spokesperson for the Cops & Docs program affiliated with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The program presents injury prevention information alongside law enforcement officers at press events.

Accustomed to acknowledging the many people who have supported her, Dr. Van Bramer quotes Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful individuals can change the world. In fact, it’s the only thing that ever has.” She thinks of her Overland High School science teacher, Dr. Ted Tsumura, as a role model who propelled many students into the sciences. “He was an amazing human anatomy and physiology teacher,” she says. “When he retired, he was believed to have had more of his students go into the sciences than anyone in the Cherry Creek School District.”

For Dr. Van Bramer, there would be many other role models. There was a Colorado College mentor, Dr. Lisa Jenks, followed by doctors at Rush Medical School who guided her through the Problem-Based Learning curriculum. During her emergency medicine residency, Dr. Peter Pons and Dr. Benjamin Honigman encouraged her in her clinical training as an emergency physician as well as her research interests in injury prevention.

Dr. Van Bramer’s tenacity shows in her willingness to keep pushing for the license plate legislation. At the same time she was awaiting approval, she served as chairperson for the Denver Metro SAFEKIDS Coalition, where she helped to lead 38 organizations whose mission is to identify and prevent injuries in children ages 14 and younger in the Denver metro area through a combined program of education, research, advocacy and media consistent with the National SAFE KIDS Campaign themes.

After having the new license plate turned down in the legislature for three years, Dr.Van Bramer enlisted the support of Sen. Paul Sandoval. “It was shocking to me that it failed three times,” she says. Though shocked, she was not deterred. She said she learned so much through the four legislative sessions. “Those sessions helped me clarify my vision,” she says.

This year, she and Sen. Sandoval were very pro-active, she says. “What I learned is that you can’t do it alone. I had my a-ha moment working on this legislative issue. Up until this, my successes in life had been fueled by me. But now, I’ve learned you don’t have to do it alone, and, in fact, it’s better when you’re working with others. Some groups send lobbyists to the legislature, but this really was a grassroots victory,” she stresses.

Now that the legislation is finally passed, the Colorado Kids 1st license plate can be promoted. Available in July 2007, the license plate will help raise funds to support local safety and health projects in two ways. It will be available as a fund-raising project with a portion of the proceeds going directly to the local organization.

Secondly, local organizations will be able to apply for grants from RMRPI, which will administer the fund created by the license plate. For each voucher a group sells, it will receive $10 to use for its own programs. Groups interested in selling vouchers will first be approved by an RMRPI steering committee to ensure recipients will use the funds to help promote safety and prevent injury in Colorado children.

Emphatic about wanting this to be a statewide initiative, Dr. Van Bramer says, “I’m committed this won’t be a Denver-centric fund-raiser. Groups must demonstrate they are promoting health or preventing injuries to children in order to qualify for Colorado Kids 1st funds.

“My vision of why we have to have Colorado Kids 1st is that of all the things that divide the world, we can all agree that we want to work for children. People will fight about things that are ideologically based, but if we can all decide as a culture that kids deserve to be ready and able to learn, there’s no reason kids can’t participate (in learning). “I want to say we need to invest in kids. I can’t wait for a year or two from now when we can say this is what we accomplished. Prevention is hard to qualify, but we know it can and will work,” she says.

Dr. Van Bramer has poured her boundless energy into community health and safety work. She is a member of the Injury Community Planning Group of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, a fellow with the Regional Institute for Health and Environmental Leadership, a former preventive medicine resident physician at Denver Public Health and with the Area Health Education Center and a former director at large of the Colorado Public Health Association.

She has lectured on many topics, including child passenger safety, injury prevention in children, the emergency physician approach to the child victim of sexual assault, the soberRIDE program, influenza and pandemics and other issues relating to safety and injury prevention.

While juggling many professional activities, Dr. Van Bramer and Erik are rearing two children ages 9 and 5 and expect a third child in September. The couple’s journey began in their undergraduate years and took them to Osaka, Japan, in 1992-93 to teach English as a foreign language at a bilingual institute. “We were in Salzburg and looked at each other and said ‘I can be around you 24 hours a day and not get tired of you,’” she says.

Medical school prepared Dr. Van Bramer for hard work and the years of dedication required for seeing the Kids 1st license plate through to legislative approval. “You just strap yourself in and get ready for the long haul,” she says.